Classical archaeologist; created the major index of Greek black-figure and
red-figure pottery based on artistic styles. Beazley's father was Mark John Murray Beazley (d. 1940), a
London interior designer and Mary Catherine Davidson (Beazley) (d. 1918). After attending
King Edward VI School, Southampton, he entered Christ's Hospital and Balliol
College, Oxford, where he was "much involved" (Boardman) with the poet James
Elroy Flecker (1884-1915). Flecker wrote poetry dedicated to Beazley and the
two enjoyed an aesthete lifestyle similar to their fellow Oxford student, Oscar
Wilde. Another Oxford classmate, T. E. Lawrence ("Lawrence of Arabia")
(1888-1935), thought Beazley had the makings of a finer poet than scholar.
However, Beazley was a brilliant scholar, taking firsts in classical moderations
(1905) and literae humaniores (1907). He spent a year at the British
School at Athens, under Richard McGillivray Dawkins (1871-1955), before
returning to Oxford in 1908 as a student and tutor in classics at Christ
Church. There he taught and inspired many students, among others Bernard Ashmole
(q.v.). Articles by Beazley on red-figure painters began appearing in 1910; his first on the Berlin Painter
was published in 1911. During World War I, Beazley served
in naval intelligence in London. In 1918 he published his book Attic Red-Figure Vases in
American Museums which included a history of the genre and the artists'
works in the text. Beazley married Marie Bloomfield (d. 1967) in 1919, the
widow of David Ezra, a casualty of the First World War. The domineering Marie took over all
practical matters of his life, allowing Beazley to study Greek art completely.
She also became an able photographer to assist his documentation of the objects.
In 1925 Beazley succeeded Percy Gardner, who had trained him in Greek art, as
Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford. In that
year, too, he published the first edition of what would be his major
contribution to classical archaeology, in German, Attische Vasenmaler des rotfigurigen Stils,
a categorical list of red-figure artist and their relationship to other
artists. Throughout his career, Beazley would update these lists in newer
editions. As a teacher, Beazley was famous for poetic flights, reading choruses
of Aeschylus or Euripides to give the mood of a work of art. In 1927, the first
of the Oxford fascicles for the Corpus vasorum antiquorum appeared. A
second Oxford Corpus vasorum antiquorum was begun in 1931 written with E. R.
Price and his former (and arguably his best) student, Humfry Payne.
That same year he began publishing the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, Attic Vase-Paintings in Boston with Lacy D. Caskey, a
project that lasted until
1963. In 1932 he and Ashmole co-authored the survey volume Greek Sculpture
and Painting. The English edition of his 1925 book of red-figure
painters, Attic
Red-figure Vase-painters, appeared in 1942. He was knighted in 1949.
Beazley wrote his corollary book on black-figure painting, Attic Black-figure
Vase-painters, in 1956. He retired from the Lincoln chair at Oxford the same
year and was succeeded by Ashmole. The final version of his red-figure book
appeared in 1963 as a three-volume work. In 1965 his personal archive was
purchased by the University and, after his death, installed in the Ashmolean
Museum as the "Beazley Archives." He continued to write and update his volumes
on Greek pottery the remainder of his life. Beazley's increasing deafness in
his final years isolated him from colleagues. He moved into the Holywell Hotel
after Marie's death in 1967. He died in Oxford in 1970. Beazley's students
numbered nearly all the important English-speaking vase specialists of the next
generation as well as many other scholars. These included, among early
students, Joan Evans, and V. Gordon Childe (1892-1957). Later students,
in addition to Ashmole and Payne, included Dietrich von Bothmer and
Arthur Dale Trendall. §SI

Beazley considered the German scholars Adolf Furtwängler, Paul Hartwig and Friedrich Hauser his intellectual mentors. However, Beazley's method was
different from theirs. Using an approach first developed by Giovanni Morelli to attribute the specific "hands" (style) to specific artists, he looked
at the sweep of classical pottery--major and minor pieces--to construct a
history of workshops and artists in ancient Athens. His predecessor at Oxford,
Gardner, purportedly distrusted the technique. The degree to which Beazley's
connoisseurship owes its origins to Morelli or Furtwängler has been debated.
John Boardman postulates that it was Beazley's friend and colleague at
Cambridge, Andrew Gow (1886-1986), who introduced him fully to Morellian
methods. Beazley had certainly read Furtwängler's writings on Greek sculpture
which used Morelli's methods. An early review of Beazley's Lewes
House Gems (1920), anonymous but known to have been written by Gow, refers to the Morellian technique. Beazley's earliest work on the Kleophrades Painter clearly owes its inspiration to Paul Hartwig (Oakley). Beazley used photographs, rather than
published drawings, to construct his attributions of painters. He also drew many
of the images personally for his archive. His articles first appeared (after an
uncharacteristic piece devoted solely to iconography in 1908) in the Journal
of Hellenic Studies in 1910 on individual red-figure painters. They
form
the beginning point for his classical pottery study. Although his books on
Attic red- and black-figure painters are primarily lists, Beazley supplemented
these
by many articles on the stylistic analysis of the artists he classified. He was
little interested in iconography. Critics of his method point out that much of
his findings are based on his conjectural hypothesis of Attic workshops and
schools. LS